Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Do We Need Principals?

Tonight during an #edchat on Twitter, the group was
discussing leadership in education. Partially joking, but with some level of
honest curiosity I sent the follow tweet out:

I got some initial kick back that schools certainly need
a principal and could not imagine functioning without. I poked back as a means
to stretch my own thinking and not necessarily to be perceived as an
anti-administration rant. With that being said, here are a few of the arguments
that came out and some of my initial thoughts.

“We need principals for discipline.”

This bothers me a little bit, because I always thought of
discipline as a teacher’s job. Now, there are certainly times when things escalate
and you need to bring in the “big guns” or reinforcements. My own school has three
administrators and a school resource officer (school police). They are called
in to deescalate situations and in some cases remove students from the
classroom. My question is, why does this have to be the role of the
administration? Can we not create a disciplinary advisory committee of sorts
that handles this? What about this committee being teachers who are trained in
such situations and provide that support? This group could also be the one that
makes collective decisions on actions taken in terms of consequences and next
steps.

“Someone has to do the schedules and plan the meetings.”

Let’s be honest, most of the meetings we attend are a
waste of our collective time and only exist for the sake of saying they exist.
A fair amount of the information in our meetings could be disseminated in a
brief email. In terms of the schedules, I think we could again utilize a small
group of teachers who are good at that sort of thing. I work with a woman that
does all of the scheduling for our team’s special days and testing days. She
has a brain that works that way and does it very well. Why can we not just tap
these people to do this?

“We need administrators to evaluate the teachers.”

Yet again, why does this have to be an administrator job?
Yes, I understand that teachers need to be evaluated and that often impacts if
people keep their jobs or in some cases their pay. However, this model does not
actually promote what it should, which is improved teaching and learning. When teachers
are evaluated by administrators that are not practicing teachers, it is
difficult to value their insight. On the other hand, if a peer observes and
provides feedback that comes from a place of credibility and in most cases more
honesty. Why can we not create a culture of openness and reflection where peer feedback
is part of the norm? If that were the case, would we still need administrator evaluations?

Now, I am not an administrator and don’t even play one on
TV. My opinions are completely based on my own experiences with administrators
and the experiences of those I have talked with about the topic. I know there
are many more things that administrators do that is not mentioned in this post
and I am not exactly advocating that we do away with them completely. I am just
wondering if there is a better way. The best administrators I know miss the
classroom and the teaching. If you talk to teachers describe the worst
administrators they often talk about how out of touch they are and not
connected to what is really going on in the building. Would all of these
problems be solved if schools were self-governed by the teachers in the
building? Could we indicate a small handful of “go-to people” in times of
emergency like the early days of the Roman Republic? I anticipate I will
reflect more on this, but would love to hear your thoughts…can a school
function without an administrator?